New on the Dashboard: Merge Entities within Search Facets

Netvibes Universal Search (available for VIP and Premium dashboards) makes it quick and simple to locate any piece of content or information from your dashboard. Simply type in a keyword, use Boolean search terms, or drill down by facets–including people, geographical location, sentiment (negative/positive/neutral), and more.

Beginning today, Premium users can now merge multiple entities together in Universal Search in order to avoid redundancies and analyze data in different ways. Here’s how it works.

In Universal Search, named entities are typed information that can be extracted from your personal corpus or sources. The Netvibes dashboard automatically identifies these entities. For example: “Donald J. Trump” is an entity under the “People” facet, and “Super Bowl” is an entity under the “Event” facet.

Netvibes’ goal is to always provide you with accurate answers to the questions you want to ask. With many redundant names in use for brands, people and events, it can be difficult to get accurate insights on the topics most important to you. Using Mr. Trump as an example, there are many different entities referring to him, such as: “Donaldrump,” “Presiden John Trump,” “Donald J. Tt Trump” and more. By default, the Netvibes dashboard tracks each of these entities separately. If you want to analyze “President Trump” mentions versus “Donald J. Trump” mentions, that’s easy to do.

But what if you want to analyze ALL Trump mentions (regardless of the name people call him)? You can now easily merge entities together on the Netvibes dashboard to avoid redundancies and group similar words together for clearer insights. This feature also streamlines the analytics on your dashboard to reveal more accurate results. For example, a Word Cloud graph showing the most popular words associated with “Donald Trump” might be cluttered with Trump names, but after you merge the entities together, the Word Cloud will list Trump only once, thereby revealing other terms associated with the topic.

To merge entities on the dashboard, click on an entity (example: “Donald J. Trump”), and from the menu click “Associate with.” Following the wizard instructions, you can associate any entity(ies) with another entity. Here are some examples where this is useful:

1. Multiple name forms

Donald J. Trump

Donald John Trump

President Trump

Etc.

→ Associate with “Donald Trump”

2. People within a company

Mark Zuckerberg

Sheryl Sandberg

Hugo Barra

→ Associate with “Facebook”

3. Products at an event

Oculus Rift

Amazon Echo

Nest Thermostat

→ Associate with “Consumer Electronics Show”

With all these products now associated with “Consumer Electronics Show” on your dashboard, the entities will appear on all analytic apps around that topic. For example, the chart “What are people saying about CES?” will analyze mentions for each of the products you have associated with CES. By analyzing all related mentions together, you can better understand what is being said on a given topic.

You can edit your association rules at any time from the “Entity Manager” app on the dashboard. You can also upload your own rules using .csv files. For example, your .csv file could list dozens of misspellings and variations on Trump’s name that you want to associate with “Trump.”